Even allowing for the creative and often hysterical reporting of the news media it is hard to avoid the conclusion that those making and executing laws and regulations in many parts of the world have taken leave of their senses. A previous culture of personal responsibility seems to have changed into a culture of dependence and blame.

Not, of course, entirely, but significantly.

This is wholly understandable. Those societies that reward the feckless and punish the responsible must expect the message to be understood and acted upon. Perhaps some rulers have forgotten that true compassion – indeed, true love – involves helping people to achieve and maintain their independence. Taking away independence is theft of the most precious possession we have.

So far this reads more like a political address on behalf of a Fascist Party than a basis for discussing what people need to learn. I make these points, however, because unless our training system starts with the right premise, everything else that it does will at best be ineffective and at worst be damaging.

I don’t need to explain the difference between education and training, between knowledge and reflection, between information and thought. So I’ll skip the bit about facts, passing exams, exam marking and the roulette wheel of teachers who can (and those who cannot) forecast the likely questions with reasonable accuracy. I’ll omit the scathing references I would have made about people who decry the Arts subjects. I’ll nod only briefly towards the words of George Santayana (1863-1952) ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.

I’ll concentrate on to why ‘what we need to learn’ has changed so much and so recently.

First, in the past few years we have come to understand better the relationship between body and brain. If there is a work / life balance to be struck there is also a body / brain balance in need of attention. Today we are at the threshold of understanding the mind. We have not got there yet but we will, and probably reasonably soon. We now appreciate that the mental prisons we feel trapped in are largely of our own making. We are all capable of much more than we thought.

Such potential brings with it the responsibility to use well the resources we manipulate and to learn a new view of the time over which we manipulate them. Strangely, our forebears had a better sense of this aspect of time than we do. They invested for what they saw as the future; we invest for the next annual – or half-yearly, or quarterly – sometimes even monthly – profit results.

Proper planning has never been so important and never so neglected.

Second, we need to learn the basic skills of interpersonal communication – or social intercourse, if you like. Whether you were in favour of invading Iraq or against it I think we can all agree that in the 21st Century settling disagreements by thuggery is an admission of failure on a breathtaking scale. But that failure doesn’t originate in the White House or Downing Street, it originates in your local town, the nearby neighbourhood, in the way we speak to a traffic officer, in the way officials deal with us.

Have you noticed how people seldom ask questions of each other these days?

Maybe they think it’s intrusive or not very polite. At a time when many of us are going to spend more time in front of our computers we need to improve our social intercourse and change it from the coffee party to intelligent, informed discussion laced with that unique ability human beings have to be amusing about serious matters. Some races have always been rather inhibited about asking questions. We cannot afford such inhibitions any more. It leads to a collection of floating islands, not to a society.

Third, we need to re-learn the joy of work. We’ve separated work and leisure to the point where work is seen as bad and leisure is seen as good. But everyone knows that too much of either is wrong. To do this we must make work joyful, not always easy when rough conditions, noisy machinery, inconsiderate bosses, rapacious shareholders demand effort and forbearance that is above and beyond normal duty. For all that, work must become a time and place of joy.

We seem to have failed to learn that the true satisfaction of a job well done is not in dollars but in the heart of the person doing it. In my mentoring the simple and true story of Alf Tuck, the man who came to thatch the cottage roof, has transformed the attitudes of hundreds of people towards their work. If you want to read it, please ask me by email, and I will send it to you.

Fourth, we need to reconsider the facts we must know. Five years ago it was important to know quite a lot of facts. Today we need to know different facts:

• how to access and store information on the Internet
• how to discriminate between right and wrong information and good and bad sources
• how to reflect on the facts we learn; facts by themselves are like random numbers; they only
• become useful when we interpret them and make decisions based on them.

Fifth, our civilisation is based on trust. That trust is based on truth, a commodity in very short supply at present. No truth, no trust. No trust, no society. There will never be perfect truth and we have to learn to distinguish between truth, lies and hyperbole. But if we do not understand and accept the relevance of truth for our very existence, our society will increasingly fail.

There are many other things we have to learn, of course. These are, to my way of thinking, the five essentials. At present they are being neglected in favour of doubtful academic awards. If you agree with my very brief summary of what people need to learn today there is one remaining question: where do we get the teachers to do it?

That’s my question to you.

John Bittleston is a Business Mentor and Career Coach

Through mentoring and coaching he helps people:

• Find the right career
• Get the correct job in that career
• Start a business
• Re-finance and re-structure a business
• Handle themselves and others better
• Present themselves more effectively

He is:

• Founder & Chairman of TerrificMentors.com
• Executive Chairman of Integrative Learning Corporation
• Executive Advisor to Intense Animation Studio
• Board Member of Mentoring Partnership International
• Member of Advisory Board of the Centre for Social Development (Asia)
• CEO of Singleton Pte Ltd
• CEO of Doubleton Limited
• CEO of W&W Entertainments Pte Ltd
• CEO of Colemore Management Pte Ltd

The 21st Century has seen a shift away from shout media to discussion media, the internet blogs, wikis, forums. I call these ‘whisper’ media because whispering has that air of intimacy that characterises them. Relationships with employees are following the same trend.

‘Shout’ management still flourishes in some places. It is giving way to ‘discuss’ management. Had it done so earlier it might have prevented the arrogance that led to the near-collapse of capitalism.

Why is ‘discuss’ management only slowly taking root?

The easy answer is pride. Those who think only they know the solutions aren’t going to waste time listening to arguments of people they regard as intellectually inferior. But pride is a manifestation of the problem, not a cause of it. Indeed, I suggest that the underlying cause is a lack of personal pride or, as I would put it, confidence.

What we see as overt pride is insecurity. Not honest doubt but fundamental uncertainty about who the proud person is, what standards he aspires to, what he sees as his role in society and what his life objectives are. The shouting manager is noisy because he doesn’t want anyone to notice this weakness. He doesn’t realise that shouting simply advertises it.

We teach the theory of “Servant-Master” but fail to apply it. Intellectually we know it is right but we lack the confidence to practice it because we think to do so may show us as weak. In fact it does exactly the opposite. The truly strong do not need to shout.

There is, however, a second problem. In our search for ‘one-solution-fits-all’ we try to define the good manager as some static model fulfilling a checklist of desirable attributes. It doesn’t work like that. The very process of discussion changes the model of the manager if he or she listens to their charges and explores what is behind the feedback.

The new ‘whisper’ media are changing communications in general. Humans have always enjoyed a good gossip and provided it is not malicious, why not? Rural villagers pass on news and views over their daily chores to sate the appetite for involvement in our neighbours’ affairs.

The mass media made coffee-housing less necessary and time pressures prevented the intimate exchanges that had made society interesting, challenging and fun. The media shouted at us. We shouted at each other, often without realising that the very act of shouting is an act of aggression, whether intended or not – noisy workplaces have more disputes than quiet ones.

All that is changing fast. The twitter, the blog, the forum, the Facebook, the Linkedin and the other online societal groups make one-to-one communication easy and fast. They can be misused, but so can a motor car and a glass of wine. Handled properly the new media keep us informed without the underlying suspicion that we are being seduced into purchases and actions we don’t want.

For the same reason, they provide the valuable feedback every manufacturer has been seeking since the start of market research, with the added advantage that views can be pinpointed with remarkable accuracy and continuously plotted. A blog is as public or as private as you want to make it. Think of the implications for a new restaurant with daily assessments of what people are saying about the food and service. The customer really is King, at last.

Sensible businesses use the information provided by the new media to change and adapt their products and services, and to communicate directly with Consumer Leaders, that influential group that dictates fashion and whim and spurs us to greater achievements.

A sign of the importance of the new media is the monitoring services that are developing. Singapore has its own innovative version of this in Brandtology, a business that uses a combination of high technology and personal inspection to provide the sellers of goods and services with a day-by-day analysis of the internet criticisms and plaudits by consumers. Manufacturers can see how consumers are reacting to their long-established products as well as to newcomers just launched.

This has already been dramatically demonstrated in the computer world. For decades, computer manufacturers and software producers have dictated what sort of computer and platform the consumer may buy, with very little reference to what the consumer actually wants. I wrote an article on the ideal laptop nearly five years ago. Only now are the computer manufacturers paying heed to consumers’ demands, and all because – logically – the first subject of internet consumer comments was the computer.

Service providers are able continuously to keep tabs on the performance of their businesses in the eyes of the users and seeing how their competitors are faring at the same time. As a way of keeping a business on its toes I can think of none better.

Could a producer also manipulate the new media in somewhat the same way that the old media adapted advertisements and editorial to produce the advertorial? Such is the new software sophistication that, combined with a modest amount of personal inspection, deliberate attempts to ‘rig’ the internet comments can be identified and eliminated and only genuine observations and exchanges are examined. They are, for the most part, amateur comments, the views and feelings of the inexpert consumer. In other words, precisely what a producer needs to know.

Perception is all in a world that is so rapidly becoming part virtual, part real.

As with all good things, there has been a price. Sitting on the couch at home, holding hands with your nearest and dearest, watching television, has had the strange effect of isolating you from each other. You may have been literally in contact but your communication was with the TV screen, not with your spouse. You have both been receiving information, not disseminating it, seldom discussing it, hardly ever initiating it.

Finally viewers and readers have rebelled. Now they can join in the information revolution, not just with facts but with views, opinions, original thoughts. When they look up their online encyclopedia – at astonishing speed – they can add their observations, correct errors and impart newfound wisdom. And they do so; Wikipedia means what it says.

The most startling aspect of the internet is its inexorable promotion of free thought. Take the simple issue of consumer protection, something Asia has largely ignored. No country had much consumer protection until Ralph Nadar started the movement in USA in the 1960s, challenging the car giants to make motoring safer through such simple devices as seat belts. Nadar wasn’t welcomed in Asia.

But if you think consumer protection is still absent from this part of the world, think again. Most people now consult blogs before committing money to a new car, dishwasher or overseas holiday. Consumer protection has been brought to Asia by the very best people to do it – the consumers. All over the world manufacturers are having to rethink their relations with their customers and with the medium that gives people such freedom to express themselves.

You will have noticed that Tesco, one of my favourite big companies, is suing for defamation. I don’t know the circumstances of the case but I sure hope Tesco does. There are many adverse comments about any large organisation today and legal action is a potentially dangerous precedent for dealing with them. You can’t sue everyone who says your service stinks. Perhaps attending to the cause of the defamation would arouse more sympathy with the customer than trying to beat him into the ground?

But consumer protection is not the only reason why so many find recourse to expressing themselves on the internet. After one hundred years of being more or less passive consumers of the mass media, we want our say. We don’t even much mind if nobody is listening. Our ears have been battered enough; our mouths are poised to take over – and our “speakers’ corner” is right there on our laptop.

The implications of the internet’s accessibility and consumer friendliness are massive. They impact on the mass media themselves, on our personal and commercial relations with each other, on education (why learn by heart when all you need to know is a click away?) and on the core need of man today to find the wisdom to cope with his new technological age.

For those who grew up in the shadow of the last century’s mass media today’s new media present a bewildering mix of excess, and personal opportunity. Excess, because we are all overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing knowledge in the world; personal opportunity, because never before have we encountered such a menu of communication, entertainment, control. From primary schoolchild to political scion, we are each faced with a level of choice that needs a clear head and a focused purpose if we are not to sink into a pond of thoughts or retreat into a safe haven of our own virtual world.

Making use of the new opportunities requires an understanding of how our individual thinking has changed over the last twenty years. This is best illustrated by the contrast between the old desire to keep up with the neighbours and the new aspiration to stand out from the crowd. Not everyone has changed and no one person has changed totally. We still need to identify with our kaki or social group but we want to be able to express our individuality, establish our right to be seen as different and unique.

So anything we say to another must be relevant, not just in general terms but specifically now. Anything that is not useful is spam. But note that one man’s spam is another man’s nourishment. Worse, the nourishment of today becomes the spam of tomorrow if we do not attend to its relevance.

As with all promotion, a sales pitch has two jobs to do – to attract attention and to sell. You can’t sell if you don’t successfully display the wares, but just showing off the goods won’t necessarily sell them. The old lesson of getting the customer to Look, Listen, Learn and Leap still applies. Or, as I used to put it to the creative teams in the agencies I ran, “Selling is L”. (You’ve probably worked out that ‘Leap’ was ‘for the Credit Card’.)

Today’s sales story has not only to be relevant but to be fast. Just making it understandable is hard enough. The development of language, both technical and day-to-day, has put well-known encyclopaedias out of business. Hundreds of new words and thousands of new acronyms emerge very day. We need to know them, to understand them and most importantly to know who else understands them.

Defining the potential buyer is not a matter of purchasing someone else’s database, although you may have to do that at times. However, observing the golden rule that 80% of your sales come from your existing customers is still the way to maximise your potential new business. There is no database like your own, and that applies if you are a behemoth or a sprat. Understand how to build and maintain a good database and you have already made over half your sales effort.

What should you say to your intended customer?

Very, very little. Remember the old adage that “More means worse”. It is so true. Observe the long diatribes poured onto the net and ask yourself, ‘does anyone read this stuff’? The answer is ‘yes, but very few’. Then ask the more useful question ‘how many people don’t read this stuff who ought to?’ The answer is ‘many’. Then ask yourself ‘how often have I seen something I ought to read, held it for a while then clicked it away unread?’ You’ll find this is common.

Clever restaurants present a taster of their speciality. It whets the appetite. Then the customer orders the dish. Today’s clever marketing offers a hint, a summary, a teaser. It also offers the whole dish, free. Then it has you coming regularly to the restaurant and the rest is profit.